The Japanese Lesson Study approach to teacher enquiry is gaining popularity in the UK. The technique sees three teachers working collaboratively to tackle specific barriers to learning. David Weston explains.

"Matt Damon just had an online conversation with Reddit users and he touched on a number of topics, including his opposition to standardized test-based school reform and the exclusion of teachers from the shaping of education policy.

He states, 'My mom’s a professor and she’s become increasingly concerned, as have a lot of teachers, about the way policy is being designed in this country. It’s being designed by a bunch of people who aren’t teachers. I’ve always believed that they have to invite teachers into the discussion to help design policy. We would never let business men design warheads, why would you cut out educators when you’re designing education policy?

I think that far too much emphasis has been put on these tests. You’re going to get teachers teaching to the test and you’re not actually giving them the leeway to do their jobs. People get tired of hearing about Finland, but they do it better than anyone, and when you look at how, it’s very simple. They have very highly trained teachers. Fifty percent of teachers here quit within five years.

The revered Indian philosopher and educator, Sri Aurobindo, knew a thing or two about engagement. His three principles for learning still serve as an important guide in designing engaging learning:

Nothing can be “taught” — engagement precedes learning, so students need to actively buy in to their learning, in order to bring discretionary activity to the process (that is, above and beyond the required outcomes)The mind must be consulted in its own growth. Activities need to personally matter to students, tapping in to their values and passions.Work from the near to the far. Make activities relevant to the world students inhabit, but build in intellectual stretch to take them beyond their cognitive “comfort zone.”

So, we know engagement can’t be done to students; we are realizing its importance in improving the life-chances of some of our poorer students; we now know it’s a lot more than just compliance.

Instead of trying to educate more scientists or engineers to drive innovation, we should focus on turning out agile thinkers, says Michael Brooks.

The ability to process, synthesise and communicate information efficiently is the premium skill of the future. We shouldn't be surprised: it was the premium skill of the past too. John Maynard Keynes once stated that what made Isaac Newton great was his ability to focus on a problem until he had thought his way through it. "I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted," he said.

When he chose to, Newton was also great at communicating ideas. The same can't be said of most STEM graduates: a 2011 UK government study reported the moans of employers that they often lacked communication and organisational skills as well as the ability to manage their time or work in a team.

The NGSS fuse disciplinary core ideas (facts and concepts within a discipline), practices (skills like argumentation and using models), and crosscutting concepts (ideas that apply across all scientific disciplines) into intertwined performance expectations (PEs). These PEs can be described as statements of “blended knowledge”.

Past assessments have typically only targeted subject-specific facts and concepts. How can we develop assessment tasks that accurately and usefully measure blended knowledge?

"Think about a time when you were really engaged in something, the kind of engagement where you lose track of time and experience feelings of joy and satisfaction. You may have felt acutely focused, physically, mentally, and emotionally absorbed in a task.

I've felt this most often while writing, reading, teaching, and coaching -- always signaled by the moment when I notice the clock and, feeling dazed, wonder where the hours have gone. The feelings are pleasant and there are always outcomes, a chapter written, or a complicated dilemma unraveled, for example.

It wasn't until I heard about the work of the Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that I learned that this notion has a name: Flow.

In my experience of developing the eduvee educational multimedia and social platform for secondary school education in the UK, I have noticed that many of the today’s school age students would not consider a career in science. However, if you ask pupils if they want to work for a Facebook, Google or Apple, they would jump at the chance. What can be done? And what is going wrong? Our classroom research shows that it is often difficult for students to make the connection between theory and the relevance to them. For example, if we consider a typical question from a student: “Miss, why do I need to know about the physics of mechanics?” A good question. All the teacher needs to do is to explain that Angry Birds—one of the most popular games ever in the app store—is based on motion of projectiles. This provides the “aha” moment for the student and shows how projectiles are relevant and the game itself encourages scientific experimentation.

Perhaps one of the most powerful expectations of students in an environment of scarcity is that they not question the source of the information. As the modern classroom has become connected, the amount of information available to both teachers and students has exponentially increased. Where teachers once lectured about important ideas and events, or shared their acquired knowledge with their students, today’s classrooms can see every key primary source document, the actual notes of great scientists, and a limitless amount of literary criticism. For students, this abundance of information means not only a changing role from the traditional classroom, but also a drastically different set of skills and expectations.

Interactive whiteboard (IWB) firms have been one of the great anti-success stories of the last five years. If you’d invested $1,000 (£610) in Smart Technologies, the Canadian IWB firm, when it first hit the stock exchange in July 2010, you’d now have the princely sum of $126. Since its own IPO the previous March, Promethean stock, too, has lost seven-eighths of its value. Revenues at both firms have plummeted. People just weren’t buying whiteboards in the quantities they were.

Science, technology, engineering and math have earned a "nerdy" reputation, but these jobs are proof that STEM is a killer career choice.

When you think of someone who codes, you might picture a person hunched over a laptop in a dark garage. But that was the stereotype of yesteryear. Today, STEM careers have taken on a wildly different perception, and some of the coolest jobs around require a background in science, technology, engineering and math. After all, someone had to build and program all of the apps and gadgets you can't live without, right?

"For decades, in science, math, and history policymakers, researchers, teacher educators, practitioners, and parents have argued over what kind of content should be taught in classrooms, playing down the inevitable presence of pedagogy or how the subject should be taught.

Well-intentioned but uninformed, these reformers have ignored how knotted and twisted together they are. Knowing content is one strand and how to teach it is the other.

Recently, educational researchers have acknowledged this age-old marriage by calling it 'pedagogical content knowledge.' They have expanded it to include knowledge of how students learn, the context in which teaching occurs, and other areas. Alas, this idea has yet to crack the mindset of reform-minded policymakers.

TV is still very much king of media in most homes. Kids watch way more educational TV — an average of 42 minutes a day — than they interact with other educational content, like mobile devices (5 minutes), computers (5 minutes) or video games (3 minutes).

If 2012 was the “Year of the MOOC,” as The New York Times famously called it, 2013 might be dubbed the year that online education fell back to earth. Faculty at several institutions rebelled against the rapid expansion of online learning — and the nation’s largest MOOC providers are responding.

A recent University of Pennsylvania studyconfirmed a massive problem: MOOCs have painfully few active users. About half who registered for a class ever viewed a lecture, and completion rates averaged just 4 percent across all courses.

What was missing, many students complained, was a human connection beyond the streamed lecture.

Despite Finnish education's strong performance in Pisa, it isn't all perfect – science and maths standards are declining and top-performing students aren't being pushed enough.

To address these fault lines, we should maximise the use of the possibilities of technology in the classroom. Studies have shown that theuse of tablet computers in the classroom improves learning, while some video games have been shown to improve brain function.

More use of the flipped classroom model, where instruction is delivered online and homework is moved into the classroom, allows students to learn at their own pace. It would also allow us to economise the expensive resource of teacher time for direct interaction with students. Another benefit is that instruction is given by those best qualified in a given subject.

"We learned the results of the latest PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) last week, and American students performed the same on the well-regarded international exam as they have for the past ten years -- completely stagnant, smack dab in the middle of the spectrum. They scored slightly above average in reading, average in science and below average in math. Meanwhile, students in the Chinese province, Shanghai, dominated the exam, earning the top spot in all three categories. It could be time for our country to look at some of the specific protocols and methods that top-performing countries are using to educate their children. Here, we have highlighted 11 education policies from highly-ranked countries that seem to be working for them. Read up America, it's time to take some notes." | by Renee Jacques

Csikszentmihalyi has identified three conditions necessary to achieve a state of flow:

The goals are clear (i.e. design an experiment which demonstrates xyz, write a persuasive essay, paint the ceiling of the chapel)The goals are attainable and within one's skillset and ability; and the challenge level and skill level are both highYou get clear and immediate feedback so you can adjust your course

Interest is at once a cognitive state and an affective state, what Silvia calls a “knowledge emotion.” The feelings that characterize interest are overwhelmingly positive: a sense of being energized and invigorated, captivated and enthralled. As for its effects on cognition: interest effectively turbocharges our thinking. When we’re interested in what we’re learning, we pay closer attention; we process the information more efficiently; we employ more effective learning strategies, such as engaging in critical thinking, making connections between old and new knowledge, and attending to deep structure instead of surface features.

The great educator John Dewey wrote that interest operates by a process of “catch” and “hold”—first the individual’s interest must be captured, and then it must be maintained. The approach required to catch a person’s interest is different from the one that’s necessary to hold a person’s interest: catching is all about seizing the attention and stimulating the imagination.

The research of Paul Silvia suggests that to be interesting, material must be novel,complex, and comprehensible. That means introducing ourselves or others to things we haven’t encountered before (or novel aspects of familiar things), and calibrating their complexity so that these things are neither too hard nor too easy to understand.

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